Clogged Pipes

By A&R

In November, with cold weather approaching, we realized that the radiators of our new house needed servicing. They hadn’t been touched in many years, and the initial cleaning resulted in weeks of inconvenience. The cleaning loosened so much dirt, rocks, bits of ash and metal that the pipes would clog up and require a visit from repair men to break up the blockages. Every day or two the heat would stop working, including our hot water. Each time the men would take between six and eight hours to clean all the pipes. Then the whole process would start all over again.

Around this same time, we had just applied for A’s work visa. The visa was taking a long time, and A had a sense that what was going on with our heaters was a picture of what was going on in the spiritual realm with his visa. There were unexplained blockages on both ends. One week, after days of workers making a lot of mess - including one night of pouring dirt out onto our bathroom floors until almost 1 AM - we finally got the heat working. What happened next made the long wait worthwhile.

We finally got the heat working. What happened next made the long wait worthwhile.

One of the repairmen who had come to our house repeatedly invited our family over to his home. We were the first foreigners ever invited to their house! He said that he and his wife invited us because he had seen that we were “grace-filled people”. We enjoyed a sense of peace with them that whole evening. Our visit lasted well past bedtime for our kids, but even our littlest one, who is normally very shy with new people and places, was happy and right at home. Perhaps, we thought, we were meant to go through the short-term frustration of clogged pipes so that we could begin a friendship with this family who we would otherwise never have met!

Then, within a day or two of our heater problems being resolved, our other blockage issue was dealt with as we received the news that A was approved for his one-year work visa! So often we look at a situation and wonder why we are in it. Moments like these remind us that we are part of a bigger story that the Father is writing, always working behind the scenes.